Disney Comes to Dinner in Dixie

One of the most dedicated vegetarians and fervent anti-hunters I ever talked with was a student, a young woman, in one of my introductory religion classes. At the University of the South, introduction to religion is designed as an issues-oriented, discussion-based course. The intention is to minimize formal lectures and to involve students as frequently as possible in class discussion. In order to accomplish this goal, many different kinds of books, movies, and class materials are used including novels, plays, comic books, newspaper clippings, and TV programs, along with the "serious" interpretations of religion represented in scholarly articles. To some extent the discussions have converged with media trends such as Vietnam protests, Earth Day and environmental concerns, abortion, and recently the Gulf War, the downfall of Soviet communism, animal rights, and cult activities such as the Branch Dravidians and militant evangelicals.

On one particular day, I began class by talking about the symbolism of meals and foods in different religions thinking that I might guide the discussion to consider the nature of sacrifice in different religions or that we might talk about the different Christian views of the Mass, Eucharist, Communion, or Lord's Supper. The class would have none of it. They wanted to talk about vegetarians. Most--as it turned out, all but one--of the class members were not vegetarians, but the campus dining hall had recently started offering vegetarian meals for those students who preferred them. About the same time, a small group of women joined by a few men, had formed a chapter of P.E.T.A.--People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Although they maintained a fairly low profile on campus, they had momentarily challenged campus sensibilites about the wearing of furs and about the use of animals for experimentation by cosmetics companies.

Although I thought there were no members of P.E.T.A. in this class, I knew there was nonetheless a wide but unfocused interest in animals shared by many of the class. Most college students carry around a fairly naive sentimentality about nature and animals. The two most referred to animals in my twenty-five years of teaching have been deer and whales. These are the animals that continue each semester to come up in class discussion. They are the animals of reference--the symbolic animals--for many students. Horses, cows, pigs, and chickens seldom come up; they do not exist as part of their base of reference for the natural world. Although these students have little direct experience with any real animals, the picture of a deer or whale has for this generation of students beome shorthand for a whole package--a very mixed bag--of concepts, ideas, beliefs, facts, emotions, and attitudes about the natural world, ecology, science, religion, public policy and private ethics. Whales connote environmental abuse and endangered species. Deer--a la Disney--represent the anthropomorphic innocence of the natural world.

TV documentaries and their general science teachers have made them keen on habitat but not, however, on carrying capacity; they know a lot about preservation but very little about predation. They know cute but not vicious. They admire but they do not understand. They have come to their sensibilities about the nature in a world expunged of all unpleasantness--a world that in its Disney version is sanitized and scrubbed free of viscera and death. They seldom see large carnivores feed in zoos and when they do, they see them being fed, not hunting and killing. Few of them--less than a handful in twenty-five years of my classes--have ever killed to put food on the table or have participated in the work of butchering and rendering an animal for the larder or the table. Too many of them, like an entire class of students in English at Vanderbilt, have never seen a live chicken. How can someone understand anything wild who has never been close enough to the soil to have seen a chicken? How can anyone understand what it means to eat meat who has never had blood on his hands?

As this class developed, one student asked, "Hindus are vegetarians, aren't they?" Another volunteered, "They don't eat cows." I began to explain the doctrine of ahimsa, literally, `not harming', in the religions of India. I explained that the world is filled with all sorts of sentient beings--souls, I say--and they can be found everywhere including in animals. Hindus and others believe that these souls should be respected, particularly those in the bodies of cows. Eating of flesh is an occasion for acquiring a great amount of negative or bad karma because it involves taking the life of a sentient being of a high order. I note that much of the basis of the animals rights movement in America is ultimately derived from this system of Asian philosophy, particularly as it is expressed in the very specialized religion of Jainism. I ask if any of them are vegetarians or know any vegetarians. One states that her roommate won't eat any beef. I ask if she knows whether she avoids beef for health or moral reasons. She reports that beef makes her roommate sick. Then Ellen spoke. "I am a vegetarian." I inquire, "For moral reasons?" She replied, "I think it is wrong to kill animals." "How long have you been a vegetarian," I ask. "Since I was a little girl." I did not push her. I was glad she had participated, and I could sense the confessional tone of her statement. Gradually the conversation turned to the dietary aspects of meat, then the meat industry, then agri-business. Ellen remained quiet.

A few days later she came to my office to sign on as an advisee. As we scheduled her courses for the next year, I began to ask her about her upbringing, how she had come to the university and what her plans were. She was raised in a small town in Alabama; her uncle had attended Sewanee and told her about it; and she planned to become a teacher. How had she come to be a vegetarian, I asked, commenting that that seemed an unlikely option for someone from a small town in central Alabama. She told me this story. She was the youngest of four children and the only girl. Her father and brothers were hunters in the full southern tradition that is inherited by southern males as birthright even if they never once pick up a gun in their lives. But these were active hunters living out a life now mostly gone from America. They shot doves, ducks, squirrels and rabbits, and deer. In the best of this southern hunting tradition, field and table were closely associated. The symbols of hunting and of family merged at the dinner table and what was killed was--in a primordial utility of nutrition and value--eaten.

One year in the early winter, sometime after Thanksgiving, Dad had killed a deer and the processed meat had been brought home to the freezer. In the course of time, Mom had prepared a roast for dinner and all the family, including Ellen, had sat down to table. Ellen was about eight or nine years old at the time. The table conversation had had no particular direction until Ellen noticed that the meat tasted different from the family's more customary beef and she had said so. Mom replied that it was not beef but venison. Ellen did not make the immediate connection. Mom explained, "Venison is deer meat. Dad shot a deer at the camp." Ellen became quiet. Her brothers and father continued to eat and talk until one noticed that Ellen was silently crying. One brother called out, "Look at Ellen; she's crying." "What's wrong, honey?" the inevitable question; the inevitable Celtic reference to girls. Ellen was silent for a moment and never raised her eyes above her lap as she replied, "Bambi. You...you killed Bambi."

A little girl at the communion of the family table had just learned a hard lesson about the world and about her father and brothers. Not only did things die like the squirrel by the power pole in the back yard and the baby bird under the nest after the storm. She already knew these things. What she now learned what that some animals were killed and did not just die, and they were killed and cut up and eaten, eaten by her Dad and Mom and brothers right in front of her, eaten by her not knowing what she was doing. It might have ended there in a deep and private resolution by Ellen not to eat deer meat ever again. Comforting or stern or wise words might have been spoken to assauge her. Or there might have been a hug that enfolded her again in the old order of things closer and truer than the family table itself. But it did not end there.

Hunters do not carry their blood guilt well. In the second-order consiousness of the modern world, old tokens of manhood such as passage and initiation have become curse and malediction. The ritual passage of the hunter into manhood is now lost. The symbolic blood marked upon the face that once betokened the passage of the boy into the world of the fathers and grandfathers has become like the mark of Cain--a scar, a defacement, a token not of manhood but instead of alienation, defeat, of disconnection from the order of nature. Where once hunting was validated as a primary human activity essentially connected to natural process which mirrored the cosmic order of things, hunting now manifests the estrangement of the human condition. The essential connection, the link between the hunter's being and the being of the world around him is now succeeded by separation, hubris, guilt that cannot be overcome by any gesture of ritual or token of kinship with the game hunted.

It is a different view of the sacrality of blood, sacrifice, manhood, and nature that is at work here. The limited emotional and political conflicts of those who favor or oppose hunting reflects a deeper--spiritual--issue about the fundamental meaning of the world and man's place in it. Nor is the issue limited to the question of hunting; it is associated more broadly with the issue of whether man is essentially an intruder, an aberration, an unmanageble hybrid, loose upon a planet that in the rhetoric of Edenic environmentalists would be better off without man. For such as these, the idea of justifiable use or of sacred dominion and stewardship is only chauvinism, not covenant. An earlier sacrality has been stood on its head by the sentimentalizing eros of a new sacral naturality: a new sacrality deeply in service of deities other than those that inspired the hunters. Sacrifice has now become sin and no hunters' works can redeem the shed blood.

It is no longer a happy world for hunters. No longer is the familiar image that of either manliness or provider. The contemporary public context of the common use of guns has shifted from field to city, from hunting to crime. Hunters are not perceived as heroes; they are grouped with all users of guns and seen as killers. However inaccurate the image is for any particular family or for the personal ethical code of any particular hunter, however much we teach youngsters the values of tradition and sportsmanship and ethical hunting, the context in which we teach these values is no longer a context of public acceptance and understanding but of public misunderstanding and fear. Guns don't mean tradition or hunting or The Old Man and the Boy. Guns mean crime. Guns mean death. The connection is neither logical nor historical, but it is real.

It is as easy as it is often accurate to blame a biased media, TV sitcoms, movies, and the influence of public figures who never seem to lose an opportunity to portray us in a bad light and lampoon every aspect of what we do. The anti-hunting public has access to a much wider range of media than hunters do, and media capacity to create and manipulate stereotypes is powerful. Charlton Heston and Robert Stack who are so often trotted out by the NRA and the Republican Party have little of the presence or emotional impact of a Angela Lansbury or Dan Rather. In contemporary popular magazine or TV media, it is all but impossible to find postive images of hunting or shooting. Hunters are killers. Hunters wiped out the passenger pigeon, white rhino, buffalo, elephant. They ride around with guns hanging in their trucks looking for something to shoot. They shoot eagles, swans, cranes. Despite what every good hunter knows, what every informed wildlife manager knows, these images persist with devastating effect. Yet bad as they are, these media images have never had the effect that hunters themselves have had. Hunters themselves must bear much of the blame for the degredation of their public image.

As a hunter, hunting apologist, hunter safety instructor, and law enforcement associate, I never have to deal with the effects of the media as often as I have to deal with the effects of hunter behavior and attitudes. When I respond to the angry complaints of local citizens who hear gunfire in the woods or see shot up road signs or opened gates or fields with truck tracks, it is the hunters who are blamed--and most often the hunters who are the perpetrators. I asked permission to hunt doves in a place where we had hunted before. The landowner said, "Not this year. Last week, those boys came up here and shot doves on the powerline. They cut the line, power went out in the barn, the house, all up and down the road." Another landowner said, "On opening day, I let about a dozen of them in here. I said they could shoot the back field. They went into my barn, got out all my five-gallon buckets to sit on and then left them in the field." Hunters might have survived the media; they will not survive themselves.

When did hunters stop caring about their public image? When did they begin to assume that somehow their toting a rifle or shotgun gave them special privileges instead of special responsibilities? When did they cease in their own minds to be sportsmen and become mere shooters and killers? For years, my fellow outdoorsman Benson and I referred to these abusers of our tradition as slob hunters--men without moral code who would not referee themselves and who gave a bad image to all good hunters. We even showed a hunter safety film about slob hunters which depicted the slob hunter not as a bumpkin but as a businessman dressed in his suit on the way to work. But the slobs did not only include the abusers who wind up in the paper when caught by wildlife officers; the slobs included the well-heeled and respectable who selfishly broke laws and scorned the traditions embodied in those laws.

One morning three of us entered an unoccupied duck blind at a wildlife preserve. It was just daylight and the registered user of the blind had not arrived, so according to refuge rules, the blind could be publicly hunted. We entered and began to call to the ducks we could hear overhead in the mist. Soon we heard the thrashing in the marsh behind us and the summons to vacate the blind. The "owner" wanted to use "his" blind. We were agreeable enough. We left and went to another empty blind a hundred and fifty yards away. No sooner than the first blind was out of sight behind us, we heard a volley of shooting. Later in the morning we heard several more volleys. On the way out, our path took us back past the first blind. We were letting our labs run and play after the confinement of the blind. Benson's bitch Jesse with her nose for every kind of thing began to prod the wet furrow of the soil where the path from the field turned into the woods. We had taken Jesse in on this same path a couple of hours before. Now she was agitated, nosing at the folded furrow. We lifted the curl of sod and found a freshly killed Crested Merganser tucked into the furrow. The story was a short as it was obvious: the merganser was a high point duck. It was neatly subtracted from the point total by the hunters who wanted a high kill tally of "good" ducks--mallards. The man who had summoned us out was a Ducks Unlimited member and duck calling champion--and a slob hunter.

I speak of these things to my hunter safety students, reminding them that hunters must be careful of their public image if we want to protect the future of hunting and have support for hunting as they grow up. I speak of deer hunting and the practise of displaying deer across the hoods of jeeps and trucks. I note that this spoils meat but that it also spoils the hunter's image. I tell the story of the pair of deer hunters I saw in a nearby town who drove back and forth on the main street honking and waving making sure that everyone saw them with the deer on the hood of their jeep. They had no idea of the offense they created. Although they lived in an area where the deer herd was large and hunting was common, they had no notion of the large number of non-hunters who now live all through our county and who are passionate to ban deer hunting. These thoughtless hunters had given their opponents yet another illustration to use against hunters.

Another instructor in the same class added his experience. He and his family had just gotten out of church and had gone out to Sunday lunch at a local restaurant. The restaurant was filled with the church crowd. Two hunters arrived with their deer lashed across the hood of their Blazer and pulled into a parking spot against the front of the restaurant. The hood of their vehicle and the bloodstained gut slit of the deer was not six feet from the windows behind which sat several dozen patrons staring at their display. These hunters were still wearing their blood-stained coveralls and their large sheath knives as they entered the restaurant to take their place at the buffet line. They were louder than they needed to be, and there was not a patron of that restaurant who did not know that "deer hunters" had been there at lunch. These men were insensitive and disrespectful: insensitive to the sensibilities and context of the in-town resturant and disrespectful of those sensibilities as much as they were disrespectful of their responsiblities as hunters. CBS had never done hunting so much harm in that community as that one parade of macho insensitivity.

The change of opinion against hunting has been tidal, not seismic. It has not been a single dramatic public event, but the combined effect of countless negative comments and innuendos of the image makers reinforced by the stupid behavior of hunters themselves who confirm in every particular the emergent stereotype that dominates both the American media and mind. The example hunters set counts--it has counted to woeful effect as Americans have seen what we have done. These Americans are not just the inhabitants of large, liberal northern cities nor are they especially the class of landless college graduates who have no connection to land or nature. The change of opinion that most concerns me is not that among these people who had little exposure to hunting to begin with. What concerns me is the accummulated and hardened change of attitude among people who have grown up with hunting, the people of farms and small towns who have been hunters themselves and who have been hunters best contact with the land and game.

It does not bother me that hunters have not won or kept the hearts of the folks in Walnut Grove or High Hampton or Boston; the suburbanization of sensibility represented in these places must of practical necessity if not for ideological reasons be anti-hunting. The landscape of human occupation and use precludes hunting as much as it does farming or gardening. But hunters have lost the hearts of the folks in the very places where hunting ought still to be a viable practise--where there is land and game enough to support the old tradition. Yet, in these places, the local mind has begun to turn against the hunters. The yellow or orange placards that are always the first visible sign of the demise of hunting make their appearance. Land is posted, then patrolled. At the sound of gunfire, the law is called. Old permissions are rescinded and written passes are harder to come by. "Personally, I wouldn't mind if you hunt, but last year Mary had a kinda bad experience. Right out back somebody took a shot...she was just getting out of the car with the grandbaby...It was them boys from over at Middleton. I told them they could hunt deer on the ridge there. No harm done, but they were just too close to the house. She don't want nobody hunting up here anymore." The story is too common. We have all heard some variant of it.

Near another place I hunt, I saw a line of "Posted" signs, perhaps two dozen of them placed almost tree to tree. It was at a narrow neck of woods that I sometimes crossed to enter another property where I had permission to hunt. I asked my land-owner friend what was going on. He said that a few weeks before, his neighbor had discovered that his newly planted pines had been used for target practise and had been cut off one after another by shotshell discharges. The neighbor's response was to go to the hardware store, buy placards, and post his land on every boundary. This was private but "open" land--it had been a place where hunters could freely cross or even hunt. The owner had not minded or checked. He willingly tolerated the hunters until someone with a gun had abused the privilege for all of us. Once, any hunter among us might have objected, "But that's the exception, not the rule. All hunters are not that way. Most hunters are respectable, trustworthy sportsmen." Unfortunately across America, these stories have become commonplace, and the tide has turned against us. Hunting is not just an endangered tradition in Connecticut and Illinois; it is endangered in Tennessee.

Ellen was sitting at the dinner table with tears falling from her cheeks. She was not hugged or comforted or even just left alone. Brothers began to taunt her, holding up their forks, sucking noisily at the juices. One let the broth roll down his chin. They chanted together, "Slurrp, slurrp. We're eating Bambi. Munch, munch. We're eating Bambi. We're eating Bambi. Nanny, nanny, nanny." Her father laughed. Ellen never ate meat again. In the span of two minutes a radical anti-hunter was created in a family of hunters. And she pursued her cause with a fervor to match her father and her brothers' hunting passion. Eventually, as she entered high school, she read anti-hunting literature; she began to study Buddhism. She worked out a personal philosophy of vegetarianism and a powerful agenda of opposition to the beef industry, agri-business--and sport hunting. But she was not a private philospher. Although she had been reserved in my class, in my office she began to state not only her convictions but her subsequent activities with Friends of Animals, Greenpeace, and other organizations. She taught in summer camps. She promoted her ideas among friends as well as fellow students. She had good reasons and high motives. And as a teacher and environmentalist, she would have an audience her father and brothers would never be able to reach--or mend.

The poet Rilke one said that the future enters into us in order to transform itself within us long before it happens. I wonder if this transformation of the hunters' future was not already working itself out at dinner that night at Ellen's house. Did her brothers, her father, already sense however darkly, that their world was fading and that the vital energy of the beast had passed from them to her? Unable to bear blood guilt in a world that is repudiating hunting, were they, in grotesque bid for redemption and cleansing, casting their spoils upon her innocence? Did they know with hunters' certainty that the hunt was over and time come to let others take the field? Did they want Ellen to be for them what she has become? Did they desire to be led by the heart of this little child?

She now works as a general science teacher in the public schools of her state. Sometimes I wonder how will she deal with wildlife in the context of environmental protection and management. What will she be telling the pre-adolescents in her classes about hunting as a management tool? Will she mention it at all? Will she, by caring teacher's sympathy and patience--supported by all the behaviorally reinforced emotion of the Disney syndrome--persuade her pupils that animals really don't have to die, or that when they do, they die quietly among friends like old elephants? How many students will she touch, influence, convince in her thirty-year teaching career? And thirty years from now will the natural world look more like our view of it as hunters or like her view of it as a vegetarian, anti-hunter? Will more Americans support or oppose hunting? Will it become easier or harder to find places to hunt? Will our children really have a place and a reason to use the guns we have put away in our cabinets? I don't think we have to wait thirty years for the answer.

Gerald L. Smith

Sewanee, TN 37375

July 1994